Makes me wonder what the underlying thread is among all of these services. Any others to add?

It surprises me that so many transactions happen through simply trust. I’ve also seen some of these situations become awkward, like when a disheveled person gets asked to show that they have the money in advance. What’s the advantage of conducting services this way? Would paying for a meal at a sit-down restaurant in advance be so weird? Can or does this translate into the web world somehow?

Things people in Seattle apparently like:

• Knee-high boots
• Roundabouts
• Not knowing how to properly use roundabouts
• Subarus
• Outdoor activities (camping, hiking, climbing, kayaking)
• Nice sunglasses (which seems odd, given the weather)
• Complaining about their not-that-terrible weather
• Not carrying umbrellas
• Making it known to you that they don’t carry umbrellas
• Galoshes (which seems contradictory, given the umbrella thing)
• Fighting gentrification that has already happened
• Having a selection of 23 craft beers, even though they’re all the same variety
• Using turn lanes to merge into traffic
• Condos!
• Mediocre coffee

Feel free to add more in the comments!

For example, I found it interesting that at the two times that the automobile had its largest jumps in adoption rates, surrealism and pop art were popular. Notice the juxtaposition of the air conditioner and Woodstock? (Was the clothes dryer responsible for the rise of soul music?) How the popularity of film noir and crime fiction went up as radio adoption exploded? Feel free to make your own crazy theories in the comments.

There needs to be a way to automatically save the referring site that you got the link from. None of this manual (via) crap. If the concept of reblogging only works in a walled garden (Reblog, Tumblr, etc) at least offer some fields so I can enter it myself if I so choose.

Everyone should treat different types of posts differently. Tumblr does a nice job with it’s given set but perhaps its full potential hasn’t been entirely played out in the templates people have made so far, and action streams are a nice first step but it sequesters those feeds into the sidebar. It makes sense that a video post and a photo post and an audio post look different, but why is there only one type of text post? Why is a Tweet handled in the same way as a 2,000-word essay? Where is the book or movie review type? Jason has done this kind of stuff for years, and had to manage entire multiple blogs just to do it. Why can’t I take a feed, create a new post template specifically for it, and plug the feed into it? And if I can, why is it so difficult?

• Future of the Left – Curses
• Les Savy Fav – Let’s Stay Friends
• Kanye West – Graduation
• Coliseum – No Salvation
• 1990s – Cookies
• The White Stripes – Icky Thump
• Spank Rock and Benny Blanco – Bangers & Cash
• The Rakes – Ten New Messages
• Pissed Jeans – Hope for Men
• Good Shoes – Think Before You Speak

Movies (again in no particular order, because although I watched over 150 movies in 2007, only about a dozen were from that year… this list should prove that.)

• Death Proof
• Sicko
• Zodiac
• Atonement
• Blades of Glory
• Superbad
• Helvetica
• Ratatouille
• Vacancy
• 1408

There you have it. Your mileage may vary, particularly with the small movie sample size.

I’d just like to say thanks to all the people who have had to hear me talk about this incessantly, the people who got random questions and problems thrown at them, and people who helped out otherwise with testing and ideas and suggestions.

There is also a new cumul.us blog that you’ll be able to keep track of, because I’ll be trying my hardest not to muddy this space, and keep the conversation going over there. (And yes, I will be updating the design of that blog later.)

What is the idea? I could bore you with buzzwords such as aggregation, prediction markets, and the wisdom of the crowds, but the real point is to take advantage of these types of things in order to give you simple and accurate weather in a way that you can both use day to day, and also provide a way to make it a more interactive and interesting experience.

• Firstly, the site will combine as many possible sources of weather forecasts as possible. No one source is ever right all the time, so the idea is that if you aggregate them together, you don’t need to check several sources and you get a safer, more accurate forecast. If you also track all of these sources and check their accuracy over time, you’ll be able to actually see which ones are more accurate than the others.
• Secondly, you can predict the weather yourself. When you make prediction for a particular time and place, the site will go check all of its data sources and record what really happened, and give you a score based on how right you were. It could turn out that a random person is a better predictor of the weather than a professional meteorologist or organization. That person could even be you. Since the site will be tracking the accuracy of all of this, you’ll be able to see who is more right, and follow them.
• Thirdly (is that even a word?) the site will give you information on the real reason you check the weather: to find out what you should wear. As people submit what they are wearing, it goes into the aggregation of what everyone is wearing in order to suggest to other people what they should wear.

Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out. For now, I’ve been keeping track of like-minded posts on del.icio.us and thrown a few screenshots up on Flickr, but the site is slated to launch at the beginning of November. If you’d like a sneak peek, just send me an e-mail, because there won’t be any lame super secret beta site with invites to pass out on Techcrunch… it will just launch and that will be it.

If you will be at the conference and want to meet up, let me know in advance or just try to hunt me down.

Also, I have a secret project I’ve been developing regarding the weather. More details and unfurling of that will be coming soon, but if you are interested, find me at the conference or e-mail me.

I found it very interesting to compare that scene with today’s newspapers and web sites. In the storefront window scenario, they only give you what you really need to know, and in a way that you can digest it all in a glance and move on. There are two elements per news item that are scaled accordingly: the headline is huge, and the deck is smaller and gives you just enough information to give a little context or update. Today’s newspapers and web sites are so crammed with titles and links and leads and boxes and ads, you are basically forced to skim and scan as a way to handle the amount of text thrown at you. Even the bastion of simplicity that is Google has a news page with a completely jumbled mess of links, photos, titles, decks, sources, etc.

One exercise I wanted to try was to design a news page that was made for the person that wanted to know what was going on in the world, but had very little time to do it; something similar to that storefront window that you could randomly pass by and learn what’s going on. So what I’ve done is taken the Google News RSS feed, cut it up, reordered it by the number of related articles it has in Google’s system, and redisplayed them in large blocks. This is no groundbreaking feat of ingenuity or design, but I think it does the job of telling you what the most important things are out there in the least amount of time:

The News at a Glance
(This looks completely wrong in IE for now until I fix it.)

What do you think?

An unknowing victim of future shock, The Denier sets himself up for personal catastrophe. His strategy for coping increases the likelihood that when he is finally forced to adapt, his encounter with change will come in the form of a single massive life crisis, rather than a sequence of manageable probems.

A second strategy of the future shock victim is specialism. The Specialist doesn’t block out all novel ideas or information. Instead, he energetically attempts to keep pace with change – but only in a specific narrow sector of life. Thus we witness the spectacle of the physician or financier who makes use of all the latest innovations in his profession, but remains rigidly closed to any suggestion for social, political, or economic innovation. The more universities undergo paroxysms of protest, the more ghettos go up in flames, the less he wants to know about them, and the more closely he narrows the slit through which he sees the world.

Superficially, he copes well. But he, too, is running the odds against himself. He may awake one morning to find his specialty obsolete or else transformed beyond recognition by events exploding outside his field of vision.

A third common response to future shock is obsessive reversion to previously successful adaptive routines that are now irrelevant and inappropriate. The Reversionist sticks to his previously programmed decisions and habits with dogmatic desperation. The more change threatens from without, the more meticulously he repeats past modes of action. His social outlook is regressive. Shocked by the arrival of the future, he offers hysterical support for the not-so-status quo, or he demands, in one masked form or another, a return to the glories of yesteryear.

Finally, we have the Super-Simplifier. With old heroes and institutions toppling, with strikes, riots, and demonstrations stabbing at his consciousness, he seeks a single neat equation that will explain all the complex novelties threatening to engulf him. Grasping erratically at this idea or that, he becomes a temporary true believer.

The Super-Simplifier, groping desperately, invests every idea he comes across with universal relevance – often to the embarrassment of its author. Alas, no idea, not even mine or thine, is omni-insightful. But for the Super-Simplifier nothing less than total relevance suffices. Maximization of profits explains America. The Communist conspiracy explains race riots. Participatory democracy is the answer. Permissiveness (or Dr. Spock) are the root of all evil.

Although it may be ironic that this may be super-simplifying, I find it interesting that I can quickly think of lots of specific people or entire industries that embody each of these characteristics almost fully. Feel free to use the comments space to make your own connections. And if you haven’t read the book, I highly suggest it.